In the field of image processing, it is often desirable to filter out noise in an image. A goal in image filtering is to smooth out small details in the image without removing salient features of the image. For example, a spatial filter may be applied to an image to filter out noise, however, the spatial filter may remove salient features such as, but not limited to, edges.
Properly filtering an image without removing edges requires an edge preserving filter, such as, but not limited to, a bilateral filter. An edge preserving filter can be employed to properly filter out noise in an image while also retaining edges. A bilateral filter may be an ideal image filter to preserve edges in an image, however, the bilateral filter can have high computational intensity. For example, if the kernel size(s) in a bilateral filter increases, then the computational intensity also increases. Moreover, if a bilateral filter is employed to filter numerous frames of a video, the computational intensity will increase even further.
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